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UN Says World Fisheries Face Collapse
Reuters via Common Dreams
A deadly combination of climate change, over-fishing and pollution could cause the collapse of commercial fish stocks worldwide within decades, said Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Program.0222 09
“You overlap all of this and you see you’re potentially putting a death nail in the coffin of world fisheries,” Steiner told reporters on Friday on the fringes of a climate conference involving more than 150 nations and 100 environment ministers.
Some 2.6 billion people worldwide depend on fish for protein, said a UNEP report “In Dead Water” published on Friday.
Climate change has compounded previous problems such as over-fishing, as rising temperatures kill coral reefs, threaten tuna spawning grounds, and shift ocean currents and with them the plankton and small fish which underpin ocean food chains.
(22 February 2008)
Lancaster Farming Speaks with Michael Pollan
Tracy Sutton, Lancaster Farming (Pennsylvania)
In this issue of Lancaster Farming we interview Michael Pollan, guru of the “real food” movement. … Pollan is the author of “In Defense of Food,” and the previous critically acclaimed best-seller “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.”
…In this interview he speaks out on the need to get more people on the land and incentives for young farmers as well as musing on milk labeling, farm preservation and eating according to what “great-grandmothers ate.”
… Michael Pollan: Farmers markets are a very important part of the solution, at many, many levels and we need to promote them. We also need to get them into the inner-city and help deal with the food deserts there.
When people are shopping at farmers markets, the farmers win, the people win, your health wins, the local economy wins. It’s just such a clear positive. I can’t think of anything negative attached to spending more on farmers markets. And it’s a very viable strategy to many farmers who would otherwise be growing commodities and suffering in the marketplace. It allows them to keep more of the consumers’ food dollar.
… Michael Pollan: Well, [Joel Salatin’s integrated, small-scale kind of agriculture] starts as a niche, but it’s going to get much bigger than a niche. People want this food. There is a very strong market for clean, well-grown food from healthy soils grown by farmers – and that is going to grow and grow.
… the question of efficiency is interesting, but you know, it depends on how you judge it. On a per-farmer basis, industrial agriculture can produce more food than any other system. On a per-acre basis, that is not necessarily the case. A farm like Joel Salatin’s is wildly more productive. There is a lot of food coming off that very small acreage.
… The other thing about efficiency is, that is one important factor, but there another factor – and that is resiliency.
Efficient systems are sometimes very precarious. This is true of industrial agriculture.
But we need systems that are resilient in the face of shocks. And there are shocks coming. There is no question about that. That is why we must nurture all these alternative food systems. It is not a choice between organic and industrial, because some of them are going to fail. When they fail, we still want to eat.
(22 February 2008)
Biologist tells how climate change affects agriculture
Sarah Kingsbury, Chico Enterpris Record (California)
Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jeff Price explained how climate change affects agriculture during the keynote speech of the California Nut Festival Saturday night.
… “There has been a lot of disinformation about climate change because it’s a difficult subject,” Price said, as he showed a number of graphs and charts during his presentation in Ayres Hall at Chico State.
Agriculture can adversely affect the environment when soil is tilled several times per year, disturbing and releasing carbon into the environment. More research is needed to determine the most efficient way to store carbon in the soil in agricultural regions like the Central Valley, Price said.
According to charts shown during the presentation, precipitation has increased 6 percent, while the frequency of heavy rain has increased by 20 percent. Less snowfall and the early melting of snowpacks in Northern California might cause water sources to dry up by the end of the century, he explained.
Essentially, in places where there is rain, global warming will bring more rain, and regions that commonly suffer droughts will continue to see a decrease in precipitation, he said.
But changes will not be immediate.
“What we’re seeing now is a result of carbon fuels released 30 years ago,” he said. “You’re looking at a big water shortage in the future for this part of the world.”
A one-meter rise in ocean levels, which is expected by the IPCC, would flood the Bay Area.
“It’s not a matter of will the ocean rise a meter,” Price said. “It’s a question of when is this going to happen?
(24 February 2008)
